Auditing data on thousands of people. Sharing information with the Department of Homeland Security. Trying to kick undocumented immigrants out of their homes — along with the citizens they live with.
Under President Donald Trump, Washington’s top housing agency is increasingly prioritizing immigration enforcement.
The Trump administration has long blamed immigrants for the nation’s housing problems, saying undocumented people are taking housing and subsidies away from U.S. citizens. But that rhetoric is rapidly turning into action, as political appointees at the Department of Housing and Urban Development exercise their power to decide who can access stable, affordable housing — and who cannot.
By law, undocumented immigrants cannot receive direct federal housing benefits such as rental assistance. But undocumented people have been able to live with family members who are eligible for benefits. The Trump administration wants to block these “mixed-status” households from housing programs altogether, arguing such moves will make housing cheaper and more available to U.S. citizens, and limit who receives federal assistance.
In recent months, HUD told the nation’s public housing authorities to check thousands of people who get housing aid through a federal service that verifies immigration status and make sure their paperwork is on file, a process that has been bogged down by data errors. HUD also unveiled a proposal that would keep undocumented immigrants and the people they live with from receiving housing benefits even if the rest of the household includes citizens or children. If enacted, the new rule would also require local housing authorities to notify DHS if they learn about an undocumented person living in federally subsidized housing.
The result: People who are eligible for rental assistance may have to decide whether to separate from undocumented family members, or entire families may lose their aid altogether. Estimates from the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials show that for every person ineligible for aid who is removed from the voucher program, about three people who are eligible would lose assistance.
Meanwhile, much of the work implementing HUD’s immigration agenda is being imposed on public housing authorities, the agencies that manage housing and administer funds in their communities. Mark Thiele, chief executive of NAHRO, which represents housing officials across the country, said housing agencies already check whether people lawfully qualify for HUD programs. But determining someone’s immigration status isn’t the housing agencies’ job.
“Putting that responsibility on them shifts immigration enforcement away from the agencies that are meant to handle it and actually puts eligible families at risk of losing their housing assistance,” Thiele said. “Housing agencies should focus on what they do best: providing homes for their communities. They should not be asked to act as immigration enforcers on top of that.”
HUD Secretary Scott Turner has said removing undocumented immigrants from housing programs is crucial to protect taxpayer funds, enforce existing laws and ensure Americans are the ones receiving welfare benefits. He has pointed to lengthy waitlists across the country and argued that immigration is driving up housing costs. To achieve lower prices, policymakers must work to increase supply and shrink the number of people looking for housing, HUD says.
HUD has described the scale of the problem in large terms: Earlier this year, the department said there were almost 200,000 people whose eligibility for housing benefits needed a second check. HUD also said there were some 25,000 deceased tenants and almost 6,000 “ineligible non-American tenants,” referring generally to people who are undocumented. Turner has said that HUD “will leave no stone unturned” and that the department is “proud to collaborate with DHS.”
“Under President Trump’s leadership, the days of illegal aliens, ineligibles, and fraudsters gaming the system and riding the coattails of American taxpayers are over,” Turner said in a statement to The Washington Post. “HUD’s proposed rule will guarantee that all residents in HUD-funded housing are eligible tenants. We have zero tolerance for pushing aside hardworking U.S. citizens while enabling others to exploit decades-old loopholes.”
Lauren Bis, acting assistant secretary at DHS, said it is essential for agencies to share information so officials can identify who is in the United States, neutralize any threats to public safety and identify any public benefits that are being used by undocumented immigrants. She said the federal service through which peoples’ immigration information can be checked is part of a government-wide effort to spot abuse and exploitation of public benefits. Only authorized law enforcement personnel with proper training perform immigration enforcement actions, Bis said.
“If you are an illegal immigrant, you should leave now,” she said. “The gravy train is over.”
The focus on immigration has alarmed public housing authorities, policy experts and career staffers who say HUD has allocated disproportionate time and resources toward immigration issues. Of the more than 4.4 million households in HUD programs, only about 20,000 are mixed-status. In those instances, an undocumented grandparent might live with citizen grandchildren or other relatives who are eligible for housing benefits.
Local officials fear funding cuts or lawsuits if they don’t comply. Housing experts and economists say the moves won’t solve persistent housing shortages, build more homes or lower housing costs. And in interviews, public housing authorities told The Post they are being cast by administration officials as having enabled alleged waste, fraud and abuse, even while they already follow the rules.
More than a dozen experts, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they feared retribution, echoed those concerns. They include officials from five public housing authorities of varying locations and sizes, employees of national industry groups, career HUD staffers and other housing policy experts.
In one of hundreds of public comments on HUD’s new proposal, known as the mixed-status rule, the California Association of Housing Authorities said the change would fundamentally alter the relationship between housing providers and the people they serve. The California group added: “This shift undermines trust, chills participation by eligible families, and entangles [public housing authorities] in enforcement functions that Congress did not assign to them.”
The administration’s immigration agenda is shaping the missions of other agencies, too. The Education Department opened civil rights investigations into universities for offering scholarships targeting undocumented students. The administration eyed an executive order that could have required banks to report more information on their customers’ immigration status before delaying the plan amid Wall Street pushback. The Internal Revenue Service improperly shared thousands of people’s confidential tax information with immigration enforcement officials.
HUD moved quickly to share more data with DHS, and staffers from the U.S. DOGE Service sought out information that could help remove immigrants from housing.
The new HUD rule would overhaul a decades-old rule that has allowed people who aren’t eligible for rental assistance to stay with family members who are. Normally, aid is distributed based on how many people in the household are eligible. For example, if one undocumented parent lives with three people who are eligible, the family gets assistance covering those three people, and everyone can stay together.
If HUD’s proposal is enacted, it would block any new mixed-status households from entering rental assistance programs. It would also force mixed-status households already receiving benefits to leave their housing or split from undocumented family members. It would also require public housing authorities to screen applicants through the federal service that checks immigration information.
Almost 80,000 people would have to separate from a household member or lose their rental assistance under the rule change, the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates. That includes 52,600 citizens who are eligible for aid and 24,300 noncitizens who aren’t. It also includes 35,400 citizen children whose housing could be in jeopardy.
Already, other parts of HUD’s immigration focus are falling on local housing authorities. The department has repeatedly said about 200,000 people have incomplete or missing documents showing their eligibility for housing aid. So in January, HUD sent more than 3,000 public housing authorities extensive lists of their tenants who were flagged and needed a second check.
Housing authorities were told to mine their lists, which were often hundreds of names long, correct any errors and send the audits back within 30 days, a breakneck pace that many housing authorities said was virtually impossible to meet. Some of HUD’s instructions were also vague and contradictory, the people from the five housing authorities and related industry groups said, making the deadline even more fraught.
Some local officials also wondered if they had legal standing to go through sensitive and personal data. HUD also appeared to make no effort to streamline or clean up DHS and HUD datasets that weren’t syncing with one another and had existing glitches to begin with, the housing authorities said.
Local teams quickly realized the vast majority of people who turned up on the lists were redundant or flagged in error. Some names were double- or triple-counted. Some people had become citizens over time. Other discrepancies boiled down basic input errors: missing middle initials, errant hyphens or Social Security numbers off by one digit. In certain instances, local officials had to call tenants to ask about their paperwork.
After a few weeks of work, many of the housing authorities had much shorter lists of names, sometimes in the single digits, that they couldn’t resolve. The housing authorities and other experts told The Post that it was hard to see how HUD concluded that 200,000 people needed another check when the true number appeared much smaller. They wondered if HUD would start using a revised count after the deadline for housing agencies to hand back corrected lists came and went.
Asked about the figures, HUD officials said the new audit cross-references HUD data with information from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Officials said that they were still in the process of going through the responses and that some housing authorities were late in sending in their complete or updated lists.
A revised count has yet to come. During a speech in mid-March, Turner described the number of people he said needed another look: 200,000.
The post How a top housing agency is carrying out Trump’s immigration crackdown appeared first on Washington Post.
